


The "I" in Tam

by executrix



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly
Genre: Fusion, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-27
Updated: 2011-04-27
Packaged: 2017-10-18 17:27:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/191391
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/executrix/pseuds/executrix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Initiative sends Faith to "recruit" River. You never know when (or in what century) you'll need a good psychic assassin.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The "I" in Tam

1.  
"But whatever do you want one for?" Ethan Rayne asked. {{Thank all deities that I'm not Ripper. If I was then when I saw Maggie I'd have to wonder if she expected me to thatch her.}} He grimaced at the taste of the awful brewed-in-lab-beaker coffee, and put down his Blue Sun mug.

"'Friend, good," Dr. Walsh said, unconsciously flicking her eyes toward Room 314. "At any rate, Rayne, I'm paying you very well to be efficient, not inquisitive." {{And you'll be locked down and sitting on your frozen assets as soon as I get what I need.}}

"My tax dollars at work," Ethan said. "Presuming I paid any, that is."

"Corporate sponsorship from the private sector," Walsh said, draining her own mug.

"You can tell your profit-optimizing friends that I know precisely where to go to find what you want."

"Not one of those tiresome Potentials, I trust."

{{Which is exactly what you don't do, bitch.}} "Why, Dr. Walsh, this job is so much good clean Chaotic fun that I'd do it even without the money. And just as soon as ever your transfer clears, I'll be on the case."

2\.   
Once the Gross Domestic Products of Switzerland and the Caymans had been satisfactorily expanded, Ethan went to the hospital, carrying a huge bunch of football mums that concealed the requisites of his trade.

Where she was going, she wouldn't need any clothes, but he knew Faith would never forgive him if he didn't bring Ultra-High-Vinyl lip gloss and mascara. He dropped the flowers on the floor, put the crystals on the bedside table, and poured the contents of three well-sealed test tubes together and addressed the fog that rose from the result.

Something translucently Faith-shaped rose (an Initiative-based Faith?) and hovered over the body in her bed. Then she did a somersault, landed on her feet, and looked Ethan up and down. "You're Ethan? Giles' ex? You look just like what B. said and the G-Man didn't."

" **Ripper** was mine," Ethan said. "I draw a distinction between the larval and the senile forms."

Faith took the makeup from his extended hand and went into the bathroom adjoining her hospital room. She licked her lips, painted them with gloss, and leaned forward to widen her eyes and then weight the lashes down with three coats of mascara. "Soul, huh?" was all she said to the useful property of reflection.

"Yes," Ethan said. "I need you to do me a favor. Well, no. To take on a commission for me. A client of mine—God bless the ladies and their little whims--feels the need for a psychic assassin, and she can't get one on QVC. You are going to take this and go and fetch her for me. And in exchange, I will re-unite your soul and your body when you return."

Faith looked at the gadget he handed her. "Doesn't have some rapper's name spelled out in little cheap diamonds, so I'm figurin', brass knucks? Cool, I didn't know anybody used those any more. Me, I'm fine with my hands and feet. Plus, whatever I can pick up along the way."

"Ah." Ethan said. "That raises a valid point. You'll doubtless be extremely…attenuated by the time you arrive at your Destination City. Which has its ups and downs. Being Spectral, that is. Get the lay of the land while you're still invisible. Then possess yourself of objects belonging to the crew members. The more of those things you can acquire, the closer your attachment will become to the material world."

"Kids! Collect the whole set!" Faith said. The concept of "crew members" niggled at her but she didn't raise the point.

"Precisely," Ethan said. "This gadget…well. Draconian Katra. Souls check in. They don't check out."

"Okay, once I'm all flesh-y and back in black on the punch thing, how'll I know which girl to glom on to?"

"Believe me, you'll know."

"So I get her into this, and run right back with Cup O'Hitter Chick, and you pour in the boiling water?"

"Reunited, and it feels so good," Ethan sang tunelessly. "And you can go about your business, the way you couldn't when none of your—friends—saw fit to retain a proper expert to sort out your little problem All right, give a moment to conjure and propitiate the necessary entities, and we'll be underway." He didn't plan to do anything of the kind; he thought that once River transmuted into Faith's body, he could bring her back and point out to Maggie that in psychic assassinry, More is Better, so Faith's body would do quite as well as that other girl's. As for Faith's spirit, well, it would just have to look after itself wherever it ended up. Probably in that other girl's body, all those years later. Well, lucky Faith. She didn't have a lot of the kind of community ties so appreciated in setting bail, and she might even live to be 522.

A fragment that was Faith-ish found herself hurtling through star-scattered space, wondering how many sentient beings were looking up the skirt of her hospital gown. She spread her legs to give them a better show, and spread her arms to increase the pinwheel effect. Faith looked around. "I am so giving Scorpy that asshole Ethan's home address if he asks me about wormhole technology."

3.  
Jayne woke up from one of those good kind of dreams, which was not that unusual an occurrence, although it was quite a new phenomenon that, when he came, the beautiful wild girl riding him started to solidify and became very nearly visible.

He reached up for her but his fingers glanced over the smooth skin clothing her still-mostly-hollow form. She tried to say something like "Yo, nice one, Big Guy," but there wasn't enough of her yet to talk.

Faith went into Book's cabin and selected a loose sheet at random from his despoiled Bible. Then she folded it over a couple of hairs pulled out of Inara's hairbrush. She glided to the deserted bridge and pulled a fin off a dinosaur's rubbery back, like pulling leaves off an artichoke. She was manifested enough for her feet to be cold, so she grabbed a pair of Kaylee's boots and decided that any psychic assassin with a teddy bear on her overalls would need more of a sense of irony than Kaylee's sleeping form seemed to possess.

4.  
Simon put his hand up to his mouth, yawned, and wondered whether it was time to emulate Mal, Zoe, and Wash and get some sleep. Maybe just one more chess game and River would be relaxed enough to sleep too.

Then at the edge of his senses (or was it just the pounding of blood in his ears as he yawned?) he detected something and turned around to face the door to the dining area.

It was certainly not the first time Simon had ever seen a young woman in a hospital gown. It wasn't even the first time he had seen a beautiful one. But the semi-solidity and the vivid green glow were unusual features. As for the look in her eye, he'd seen it sometimes elsewhere, when events were arranged to maximize Jayne's satisfaction, and he didn't like it at all.

He stood up at the head of the dining-room table; River put her hands down on the table, framing the chessboard. Simon spread his arms to make it harder to go around him. He whispered, "Riv-er! Run away!" (but she had figured it out already, darted under the table, and departed as silently as if she already had the power to vanish).

Faith shot him a disgusted look—crap, this was TOO easy!—and also shot him a roundhouse kick in the head (grateful for Kaylee's boots), sending his head caroming off the corner of the table. "You don't fix Faith," she said. "She fixes you."

Once she saw that he went down and wasn't coming back up, she dipped two fingers in the pool of blood (feeling her muscles flex as they fell into place like a progressive JPEG) and raced off after River.

5.  
Inara knew the tone in which a man of iron control acknowledges an emergency, so she didn't need a second summons after she heard the Comm ("Please come to my room, Inara.")

"Are you really a Shepherd?" she asked, looking around Book's cabin at the hydroponic unit's display of potted herbs (most of which she recognized), the alembic, and the bagna mariae.

"Well, yes, among other things. There's more than one thing you can do with rosemary."

"The Virgin's herb," Inara said. Book nodded.

"Many members of my Order have been alchemists—or, I suppose you could say, a certain number of alchemists have been priests. Our young doctor was kind enough to lend me his encyclopedia, and I was able to reconfigure it to find some most useful texts. And now that we are facing a spectral enemy, it would be nice to find some use for the Vessel of Patmos I've been carrying around in my satchel for the past few decades or so."

Inara shook her head, and one dark wing of hair cascaded over the face. "I can't countenance the use of spiritual power to commit harm."

He could see the memory of a dozen or so Crusades and the Inquisition flicker in her eyes. "But it won't be for harm, it'll benefit her as well. I can sense that this girl is deeply sundered, and that was the entry point for whoever sent her here. And I think that she has been touched by Evil, but is not entirely surrendered to it. She needs to find greater integration, but in her own time and place. She doesn't belong here."

When he explained, Inara smiled—a genuine one, not the one the clients paid for. "It would be a privilege to be able to use a Vessel of Patmos. The traditions of the House Madrassa rather discourage physical Workings, so I don't know as much as I'd like. Still, I have something in my shuttle that might help."

6.  
Jayne didn't have anything compelling to do, so he was still in his bunk, rehearsing that remarkable experience. Book tapped on the door and gave Jayne enough time to Adjust His Clothing, then explained what he wanted Jayne to do.

"Don't rightly see the point," Jayne said.

"I'm not quite sure the form that it takes, but I believe she intends some harm toward River."

"And that would be a problem because?"

"Part of our journey is to keep her safe."

Jayne started to turn away. "Yeah, well, when it comes to girls that ain't all there, I don't see why I shouldn't stick up for the one that threw me one."

Book decided it was time to bring in the Big Guns. And that sometimes lying was justified in pursuit of the greater good. "Well, you know, Jayne, consorting with a succubus is safe enough the first time, but additional contacts…. Rather like RH incompatibility. Repeated encounters…could be fatal." Then he decided that perhaps that was a prudent equivocation, and not even really a lie.

7.  
Inara knelt, breathed to clear her mind, and lit the incense. "Nam myo rengye kyo," she chanted. Book knelt opposite her, inhaled the fragrance of myrrh, and chanted, "Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner." After a few minutes, they raised their hands, and they grinned with delight as the power arced between their paralleled palms.

Inara bent forward and raised one of the four cards. "Spiritus," she said. "The Soul." For a moment, she held it under her chin, the picture facing outward. Then she tucked it into the square-cut neck of her bodice.

Book upheld the card closest to his right hand. "Sophus," he said. "Wisdom."

Then Inara lifted the third card, which was face down. "Animus," she called. "The Heart."

Simon did not find it particularly easy to stand up, what with his hair being glued to the floor with blood, but he quickly reassured himself that you always get that florid effusion with scalp wounds anyway. {{If I'd only been in Inara's shuttle the blood would hardly show up}} he thought.

In the Infirmary, his chief findings, apart from a millennial headache, were a gash at the back of his head and (as he tilted forward to stare into the mirror) one pupil three times the size of the other.

He didn't have the energy to deal with setting up a mirror behind his head to put in a weave. So he just took off his shirt (about a quarter of its back dyed brown), used a clean part to wash out the wound, and let the shirt lie on the floor where it fell. There was still a splotch that might have been a red sun on the back of his white undershirt, but he didn't notice.

{{We can put people on seventy planets}} he thought {{And yet the only treatment we have for concussion is 'Lie down and wait for it to go away.'}} He dry-swallowed a couple of amphetamine caps {{SOOOO contraindicated}} he giggled, and stumbled stiff-legged out of the Infirmary. He didn't know what was wrong or where it was happening but involvement of River seemed like a good guess.

8\.   
He found River, locked in combat with the gorgeous hellion, up on one of the catwalks. River's lip was bleeding in two places, and a black eye was forming, evidenced by the bloom in the white of her eye. River was panting, and Faith—if she needed to breathe at all-wasn't even winded. She'd already had River on the ropes—slammed her against the railing—several times, and expected to be able to bring the fight to a close as soon as it stopped being so darn much fun. Once River was down flat, Faith planned to press the gadget against her throat and capture her that way. She expected Ethan to have the equivalent of a bank of operators ready to bring her back as soon as she scored the put-away.

Simon grabbed Faith's arms from behind and tried to haul her backwards. "Look, whoever you and however you got here, you can't hurt River," Simon said. "It's not allowed." His hands glanced away and she didn't even bother to knock him down again.

9.  
"Manus," Inara breathed, lifting the card. "The hand."

Jayne halted his run from the other end of the catwalk to talk into the Comm. "Now I gotta do it now, right?"

"Well, Jayne, you could wait for the Second Coming," Book said. "But if I were you, I'd do it now, yes. Let what is sundered be restored," Book prayed. "Let the perturbed rest. Let the turbulence be appeased."

River's mouth formed a surprised "O" and she leaped straight at Faith, breast-stroking the air the way she once swam lengths in the pool at the Rawalpindi Club. And, like an SUV hitting an econobox, River's skull smacked into Faith's far harder than the impact River felt herself. River swung around and kicked at Faith's kidney, spinning her back to face Jayne.

Jayne twisted the top of the Vessel of Patmos, leaving it loose but still attached, and lobbed it at Faith's stomach. When it hit the Manipura chakra, the Vessel opened on its hinge.

"Son of a…" Faith said, and in the blink of an eye grew more and more transparent, shrank, got tinted the shade of turmeric, and whizzed into the Vessel, which secured itself on Book's signal.

Back on Earth that Was, when it Was, the Vessel landed between Faith's breasts, right next to where the vent tube tethered her body to its supports. The lid popped open.

"Bitch!" she said, sitting up. Together again for the first time. She pulled out the tubes, dabbed with a tissue at the resulting spots of blood, and fetched her clothes from the closet at the other end of the room. Now that she had pockets, she put the device into one of them. It seemed like something that could come in handy in a tight spot.

Maggie Walsh and Ethan Rayne would have been very dismayed by the failure of the mission, if it weren't that, in their various ways, they had troubles of their own.

10.  
Uber-River stood a little apart from her extended crew family, reveling in her gathered new powers. "Theirs," she says. "That's Heirs and T. Or It and Hers."

**Author's Note:**

> Technically, this is both a crossover (because there are characters from both fandoms) but a fusion: a Firefly version of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Primeval."


End file.
